This weekend’s Stossel on Fox Business, rebroadcast on Fox News on Sunday night at 9 pm, is one of his best yet, mainly because of the high caliber of the guests, Judge Andrew Napolitano, economist Chris Coyne, and historian Thaddeus Russell.

I feel slightly odd recommending this show and talking about how brilliant the guests are as I have attended lectures by all three of them. They are all very different personalities, and each of them basically makes me want to go back to law or graduate school and become more intellectually engaged.

Russell is a sometime contributor to reason, Coyne has written two books, one each on war and on foreign aid, and Napolitano is well known as FOX’s in house judicial and constitutional expert.

Speaking with host John Stossel, Russell explained his central thesis that while progressive ideology is deeply rooted in the desire to “rescue” other countries, it comes with the unfortunate “obligation to kill.”

Ultimately, Russell suggests, as a result, “when the United States has taken on the responsibility for the well-being of humanity, it has destroyed far more lives than it has saved.” As he tells Stossel, progressives need to take that history into account before advocating for more humanitarian interventions abroad.

Read the column HERE. And then take a look at the segment below, via FBN:

Meanwhile, Senator Rand Paul is extensively interviewed on Geraldo At Large, rebroadcast at 1:00 am on Fox News. Geraldo also shows a clip from the Zapruder film in another segment, which he was the first person to televise 30 years ago.

It’s curious that Ann Coulter is charging libertarians with sucking up to progressives. I don’t disagree with her that one can find libertarians or “liberaltarians” who do this, especially in academe, the media, and inside the Beltway. But Ms. Coulter herself in her tortured legal “philosophizing” thinks that African Americans, and African Americans alone, should be given special legal privileges no one else has, at the expense of everyone else, because America once had race slavery. What is that if not sucking up to “liberals”? Especially when black comedians like Chris Rock point out that American Indians had a harder time than blacks. Not to mention the fact that, if you want to play this game, women and gays didn’t have a jolly old time before or after Emancipation. And that no one alive today in any of these groups has been a slave, except to the federal and state governments, and no government programs overall help disadvantaged groups get out of their underclass status.

Coulter’s barbs and jokes at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Committee, where she is less defensive than when before libertarians, are indeed entertaining.

Ms. Coulter’s history with libertarians predates the recent Students for Liberty/Stossel kerfuffle about which Nick Gillespie writes on the reason magazine website today.

She was once approached by the Connecticut Libertarian Party to run for Senate against a RINO Republican when she opined that she would seek the LP line to run against him and make him lose to the Democrat. The LP decided she was not sufficiently pro-decriminalization so it thanked her for the meeting and did not allow her the candidacy. (A woman scorned?)

Early in her career out of law school she became friends with a libertarian Republican fellow Hill staffer and lawyer (who is now my neighbor). He stills reads her books before they are published and tries to persuade her each time to remove the most non-libertarian elements. Following CoCo Chanel’s advice about accessories, she is reported to only remove one item each book.

At her book signing in DC last year at the offices of Grover Norquist group, Americans for Tax Reform, Ms. Coulter entered to first encounter me and a Ron Paul donor to whom I had just given a Gary Johnson button. It was the day after Romney’s one good debate, and she grabbed my friend’s blouse and looked into her face nose to nose and said “Oh no no no no no no no – after that f-a-b-u-l-o-u-s performance last night you must be for Romney!” She then grabbed my own epynomous button for my Congressional campaign on my shirt and stared at me, to which I non-confrontationaly said “It’s for a local campaign.” She released me intact from her grip. Later one could hear her reply to a book buyer’s question of how her day was going – “it was great until I got here, and even here there are Gary Johnson buttons!”

My girlfriend Ann Coulter, who I am known in libertarian circles to have a man-crush on (if only she were a real boy!), intrigues me with her acerbic commentary and confrontational style. I believe that’s the real her, and not a marketing strategy. She’s not just the Madonna of the right.

I even enjoyed sitting a few rows away and watching Ann be interviewed before 1400 mainly very unsympathetic libertarians this past weekend at the 6th Annual International Students for Liberty Conference in Washington, D.C. (Living within walking distance of the several locations where all 6 have been held, I’ve been lucky to attend 4 of them.). The interview was a taping for John Stossel’s show, and she was interviewed in a two hour sequence of interviews that included Congressman Justin Amash and former Ambassador John Bolton (who was also interviewed last year). I believe these will be aired as the next two Stossel shows, one tomorrow night, and one the following Thursday, on Fox Business, with various insomniac broadcasts on both Fox Business and the Fox News channels.

Like Bolton, my girlfriend Ann always pitches herself as a libertarian, “but….” She wants a world of nations where people have maximum individual freedom except where allowing it would diminish it. She’s Hegelian even though not Marxist. Bolton of course worries about civil liberties and non-intervention allowing tyrants abroad to gain power, a worthy debate but one where he would have more cred if he had spent more time in the past calling for defunding tyrants.

Ann’s hang ups include worrying that people using pot will become slackers, and end up on welfare adding to the oppression of all of us tax serfs. It’s similar to the somewhat more credible fears that illegal immigrants will be used to oppress taxpayers, especially since we now know illegal immigrants are using $2 billion in tax funded health care, set to explode under fully government controlled medicine.

Here’s the problem though – we don’t have any accurate statistics on the budgetary and opportunity costs of the drug war or of illegal immigration. I just ran for office in DC and I tried to find numbers on arrests, incarcerations, and budgets, either for the drug war as a whole or for pot specifically. I’m not sure anyone knows. Nor do I think anyone knows how many people have criminal records for non-violent drug crimes, nor how many have been prevented from obtaining employment because of them, such that they did either end up on welfare, or have much reduced life term earnings and careers.

Clearly Ms. Coulter knows everyone who smokes pot isn’t a slacker; at one point in the Q&A she replied to someone who asked why she so often smeared libertarians as stoners that “you’re not stoners, you’re nerds.” So apparently some people can smoke pot and still become successful IT entrepreneurs.

Likewise we don’t know how many red blooded, native born, Americans, or even legally immigrated ones, can only make a living running farms, restaurants, and construction companies because they have access to illegal immigrant workers. Maybe in both cases we need to make the economy more vibrant, and the tax funded benefits more meager, so that stoners and illegals will simply find it more attractive to get a job, start a business, or have a career. In the free market community Ann, which you are welcome to join, we call those incentives.

Both Bolton and Coulter have a blind spot (which doesn’t mean they can’t argue that their opponents have their own blind spots, and ask whose is bigger). They see the problems of welfare parasitism or Islamic violence, but don’t ask if our policies are funding and fomenting it. Is the only evil that lazy slackers go on welfare, or is it also an evil that government schools, government regulations that keep poor people from starting small businesses, and the drug war that gives them criminal records, keeps them from ever getting out of welfare. Thereby incidentally leaving whatever opportunities do remain available for nice girls from suburban Connecticut schools who have the grades to get into law schools (and access student loan programs and other forms of upper middle class welfare). Most of these Connecticut girls end up being the Elizabeth Warrens who perpetuate the system, living in DC on their 6 and 7 figure salaries as regulators and lobbyists, blocks from the people they have condemned to lives of poverty and illiteracy. Ann’s path is better, but not good enough.

prospects for reducing spending during the next four years, and how the CRS is working to turn up the heat. You may remember that last month John wrote a syndicated column, “It’s the Spending, Stupid,” that praised our work.

of Americans for Tax Reform. His crime? He heads a movement that asks political candidates to pledge not to raise taxes.

I think Grover accomplished a lot. But I wish he’d convinced politicians to pledge not to increase spending.

President Obama says raising taxes to cut the deficit is a “balanced” approach.

Balanced …

But what’s “balanced” about raising taxes after vast increases in spending? Trillions for war, Medicare, “stimulus” and solar panels. Tax receipts rose — after tax- rate cuts — from $1.9 billion in 2003 to $2.3 billion in 2008, the year the recession started. That increase couldn’t keep up with the spending. The deficit doubled — actually, more than doubled — as politicians increased spending to nearly $4 trillion! Our debt, at more than $16 trillion, now exceeds our gross domestic product.

Ludicrous, irresponsible spending is why we’re in trouble. As columnist Ron Hart points out, Bill Clinton’s balanced budget spent $1.7 trillion. “Adjusted for inflation,” he writes, “our federal government would (have) a $200 billion surplus. But instead of increasing government spending in line with normal inflation, under Bush and Obama we are spending $3.8 trillion today. Democrats, who believe we have a ‘revenue’ problem instead of a ‘spending’ problem, must also think they have a bartender problem, not a drinking problem.”

The media obsess about tax rates, but spending is more important. As Milton Friedman taught us, spending is a far more accurate gauge of the government burden. If government spends a dollar, that dollar is taxed away from someone. If it’s borrowed, it’s removed from productive use, setting the stage for higher taxes later. If the government prints more dollars to fund spending, our purchasing power falls. Transferring purchasing power from the people to the government via inflation is a form of taxation.

If Republicans and Democrats reach a deal, the tax increases will be real — but spending “cuts” probably illusions. If they actually happen, they will only be reductions in already planned increases.

The Wall Street Journal notes that when the two parties talk about cutting spending by $4 trillion over a decade, “those numbers have no real meaning because they are conjured in the wilderness of mirrors that is the federal budget process. Since 1974, Capitol Hill’s ‘baseline’ has automatically increased spending every year according to Congressional Budget Office projections … . Tax and spending changes are then measured off that inflated baseline.”

Given our growing debt, can’t they even slow the growth of government to the rate of inflation? Or inflation plus 1 percent? Or even inflation plus 2 percent? That might balance the budget within a decade.

But the spenders won’t even give me that. They want more. Always more.

Jonathan Bydlak, founder of the Coalition to Reduce Spending, has a good idea. “It’s important to do for spending what Norquist has done for taxes: create a means for voters to hold elected officials accountable when they break campaign promises of fiscal responsibility.”

Bydlak has no time for any politician who pledges not to raise taxes without pledging to cut spending. He praises Doug Collins, representative-elect from Georgia, and Ted Cruz, senator-elect from Texas, for signing the Reject the Debt pledge and thereby promising voters they would:

“ONE, not vote for any budget that is not balanced nor for any appropriations bill that increases total spending;

“and TWO, consider all spending open for reduction, and not vote to authorize or fund new programs without offsetting cuts in other programs.”

Well, sure. Good luck to him.

But people are reluctant to give up their favorite programs. Or any programs.

Let’s not fool ourselves about how dependent politicians have made people on government.

To succeed, the crusade to cut spending needs an ideological understanding of how unsustainable our current course is, not just a narrow appeal to short-term self-interest. People will have to see the wisdom of giving up government benefits now — in exchange for something more abstract: a future free society in which our children won’t be burdened by debt and taxes.

John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “No They Can’t: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at www.johnstossel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

Please tune in at 9:00 PM ET, as John and I discuss the the prospects for reducing spending during the next four years, and how the CRS is working to turn up the heat. You may remember that last month John wrote a syndicated column, “It’s the Spending, Stupid,” that praised our work.

P.S. If you can’t tune in live tomorrow night at 9 PM ET, don’t forget to set your DVR!

It’s the Spending, StupidBy John Stossel. December 18, 2012

Listening to progressive media pundits, I’d think the most evil man in the universe is Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. His crime? He heads a movement that asks political candidates to pledge not to raise taxes.

I think Grover accomplished a lot. But I wish he’d convinced politicians to pledge not to increase spending.

President Obama says raising taxes to cut the deficit is a “balanced” approach.

Balanced …

But what’s “balanced” about raising taxes after vast increases in spending? Trillions for war, Medicare, “stimulus” and solar panels. Tax receipts rose — after tax- rate cuts — from $1.9 billion in 2003 to $2.3 billion in 2008, the year the recession started. That increase couldn’t keep up with the spending. The deficit doubled — actually, more than doubled — as politicians increased spending to nearly $4 trillion! Our debt, at more than $16 trillion, now exceeds our gross domestic product.

Ludicrous, irresponsible spending is why we’re in trouble. As columnist Ron Hart points out, Bill Clinton’s balanced budget spent $1.7 trillion. “Adjusted for inflation,” he writes, “our federal government would (have) a $200 billion surplus. But instead of increasing government spending in line with normal inflation, under Bush and Obama we are spending $3.8 trillion today. Democrats, who believe we have a ‘revenue’ problem instead of a ‘spending’ problem, must also think they have a bartender problem, not a drinking problem.”

The media obsess about tax rates, but spending is more important. As Milton Friedman taught us, spending is a far more accurate gauge of the government burden. If government spends a dollar, that dollar is taxed away from someone. If it’s borrowed, it’s removed from productive use, setting the stage for higher taxes later. If the government prints more dollars to fund spending, our purchasing power falls. Transferring purchasing power from the people to the government via inflation is a form of taxation.

If Republicans and Democrats reach a deal, the tax increases will be real — but spending “cuts” probably illusions. If they actually happen, they will only be reductions in already planned increases.

The Wall Street Journal notes that when the two parties talk about cutting spending by $4 trillion over a decade, “those numbers have no real meaning because they are conjured in the wilderness of mirrors that is the federal budget process. Since 1974, Capitol Hill’s ‘baseline’ has automatically increased spending every year according to Congressional Budget Office projections … . Tax and spending changes are then measured off that inflated baseline.”

Given our growing debt, can’t they even slow the growth of government to the rate of inflation? Or inflation plus 1 percent? Or even inflation plus 2 percent? That might balance the budget within a decade.

But the spenders won’t even give me that. They want more. Always more.

Jonathan Bydlak, founder of the Coalition to Reduce Spending, has a good idea. “It’s important to do for spending what Norquist has done for taxes: create a means for voters to hold elected officials accountable when they break campaign promises of fiscal responsibility.”

Bydlak has no time for any politician who pledges not to raise taxes without pledging to cut spending. He praises Doug Collins, representative-elect from Georgia, and Ted Cruz, senator-elect from Texas, for signing the Reject the Debt pledge and thereby promising voters they would:

“ONE, not vote for any budget that is not balanced nor for any appropriations bill that increases total spending;

“and TWO, consider all spending open for reduction, and not vote to authorize or fund new programs without offsetting cuts in other programs.”

Well, sure. Good luck to him.

But people are reluctant to give up their favorite programs. Or any programs.

Let’s not fool ourselves about how dependent politicians have made people on government.

To succeed, the crusade to cut spending needs an ideological understanding of how unsustainable our current course is, not just a narrow appeal to short-term self-interest. People will have to see the wisdom of giving up government benefits now — in exchange for something more abstract: a future free society in which our children won’t be burdened by debt and taxes.

John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “No They Can’t: Why Government Fails, but Individuals Succeed.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at www.johnstossel.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.